In reading this postre the false claims about Obama not deserving any credit for the SEAL raid decision, and in reflecting back on how often I receive related BS like this in emails from older conservative acquaintances/relatives etc., I’m wondering if any of this has a common source and/or if anyone has ever bothered to trace it back to the source?
Reported
For what?
It wouldn’t surprise me at all- after all, we’ve got an entire political party and propaganda machine devoted to making sure that the President fails at any cost. However, I don’t think we can ever know for sure, short of a smoking gun or a whistleblower.
I’m going to give What Are Ellipses ?!?! the benefit of the doubt and assume that he reported the thread to have it moved to Great Debates, which is probably where it should’ve been posted.
…or Elections… or even straight to the Pit. It really depends.
Why would they have a common source? There are millions of right wingers and Obama haters out there. I expect a reasonable proportion of them (as of most other large populations) are not averse to lying, and not incapable of making up plausible stories. In any case, many of the stories may originate, like many other rumors, not as outright lies but as baseless speculations whose speculative nature gets forgotten as they are passed around amongst people who would like to believe that they are true.
To suggest that all such stories must have a common source (what are you thinking, some sort of secret Republican black propaganda bureau?) seems to me to be a prime example of conspiracy theorizing at its worst. Unlike most conspiracy theories, there is not even anything very weird or surprising here to be explained.
Seems like a valid question to me.
Where’s the debate? All I see is a question seeking a factual answer.
What? He’s clearly asking two factual questions. I suspect the answers are “no” and “no”, respectively, but I don’t know.
No, and no.
While it seems likely that many of these fabrications come from right wing sources, those that appeared during the 2008 primaries could just have easily come from his Democratic opponents.
Please observe and learn how to ask a factual question about politics. Knowing how to ask questions is even more important that mere asking. It gets you much better answers.
The answers are no and yes. Certainly some comments have been traced back to originators. Snopes has done that but so have have other investigators. There is no evidence that they are working in concert, though.
Whilst it is hardly likely that there is a sole source of stories, fabrications and assertions, one might find that there are a number of people who delight in collecting and redistributing them. But again hardly likely only one. One can see this in the nutjob conspiracy theorists of all different shades. Many delight in repeating one another, and it becomes a bit of an echo chamber. Not just politics, or global conspiracies, but the alternative medicine nuts and so on. Stories get retold, and one could also imagine a certain common flavour creeping in in the retelling, as they pass through the curators hands.
Then again, as Asimov wrote in Jokester, perhaps finding the answer out might not be a good idea.
Impossible. If the second answer is no, the first is undetermined.
Well, to be fair, just because a certain question may theoretically have an objective factual answer doesn’t mean that in practice it won’t be better suited to a debate.
There is not going to be universal agreement about exactly which statements about Obama constitute “made up assertions”, nor IMO is there going to be any practical way of determining objectively what the ultimate sources of all such statements are. So yeah, looks to me like we gots ourself an argument here.
I agree that jumping into a not-obviously-commercial-or-trolling thread just to state without any qualifications or explanations that you’ve reported the OP is kind of a dickish move, though.
There are groups that are very effective at getting their “talking points” out. Karl Rove is a grandmaster at this.
The Daily Show will occasionally point out a talking point overkill by running a collage of several people all saying the same thing on cable shows. A recent example is the complaint of Obama “spiking the football” on the anniversary of killing Bin Laden.
So there are a small number of very influential people that spread some of these things, but a much larger set of lesser folk working on their own. So no single source, but certainly the bulk comes from a quite small number of sources.
The first rule of talking points sources is you don’t talk about talking point sources. No matter how obvious it is.
Yes, there is a single source.
We have narrowed it down to either the Reptilian aliens or Cats.
One group is trying to control us and the other is just trolling us. Investigations are counti… Oh look Kitten Cam!!!
No, you haven’t. What the … !!!, don’t falsely state that you have a reported a thread when you have not done so. I don’t see any thread reports from you or anyone else on this thread.
This is clearly some kind of oblique commentary on having one of your threads moved out of Elections, which you started anATMB thread about. Let’s confine the discussion to the appropriate forum. Your are also playing junior mod, which is a potentially warnable offense.
What the … !!!, you seem to have a great deal of difficulty understanding what is appropriate for GQ. You’ll avoid trouble best by confining yourself to factual posts that actually relate to the topic on hand rather than making extraneous comments like this.
No warning issued, but don’t drag your concerns about actions on other threads into this forum again.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Since I was the person who sort of speculated about this in that thread, let me elaborate. I don’t really think they all originate from the same source, but it’s uncanny how similar in style most of them tend to be. That’s what I was getting at. Maybe it’s just group-think or maybe they use earlier screeds as a template.
That’s what kind of struck me too. They seem vaguely similar stylistically, and a number of them adopt a variation of the “fed up authority figure telling it like it is” model, and when you peel back the layers like Snopes does it all just vanishes in a cloud of BS (along with the purported authority figure much of the time).